AS the name suggests, elephants take centre stage at Addo Elephant National Park. After all the park was originally established to save the beleagured Eastern Cape elephants from extinction.
Now Addo has grown from its original 2 270ha to an impressive 148 000ha in extent. Embracing an amazing five of South Africa’s seven biomes, it provides habitat not only for elephants but for countless other creatures, great and small.
Stretching from mountains to the sea, it boast not only the Big Five, but what Addo management calls the Big Seven. As well as spotting the elephants, lions, buffalo, leopard and rhino, visitors might well see great white sharks and southern right whales. The smaller denizens, including an impressive avian tally, provide plenty of interest too. In fact, the endemic flightless dung beetle is quite a celebrity in the park.
The wonderfully varied fauna and flora make Addo a very interesting slab of wilderness to explore. It is also a very comfortable, visitor-friendly and attractive park, offering world-class amenities. The main camp is an absolute delight, with excellent fascilities for campers and caravanners, a choice of classy, comfortable self-catering accommodation, beautiful gardens, a good restaurant and well stocked shop, an attractive day visitors’ area, a floodlit waterhole, an underground hide and a bird hide.
Visitors to the main game viewing section of the park offers can explore it along an extensive network of good roads, pleasant picnic sites and plenty of viewing points. Although this section attracts the highest concentration of visitors, the newer sections are opening up fast. There is a secluded tented camp in the more remote Zuurberg area, the rustic Mvubu campsite in the mountainous Kabouga area, some challenging but very scenic 4X4 routes and four privately-owned luxury lodges in concession areas, giving the park an upmarket twist.
Being close to some of South Africa’s major tourist routes, it is easily accessible too, and we have been able to include it on our travel itineraries on a number of occasions. For all its many attractions, however, it is still the elephants that are its biggest drawcard. The Addo herds are incredibly good natured and are well used to vehicles. They never object to the crowds of humans who come to watch them at their waterholes. It would be most unusual not to enjoy a good few quality elephant sighting even on a short visit to the park. Not surprisingly, many of my memories of Addo are of wonderful encounters with these peaceful pachyderms but a favourite memory centres around people, with the elephants playing only a supporting role:
The people in question are a truckload of young overlanders who clatter into camp one peaceful afternoon. We have met many overlanders on our African travels and most of them are pretty nice people. Some, though, have been pretty annoying. Almost any African traveller will have stories to tell about groups of rude, noisy, selfish and generally irritating overlanders who take over a camping area, commandeering most of the facilities for their own use and destroying any peace and quiet with their incessant banging of trunks, boxes and other bulky camping equipment. Fortunately, they are in the minority.
The crowd that is setting up camp near our site doesn’t look too promising. With a punky hairdo, a plethora of colourful tattoos and an amazing amount of metal studs and chains decorating his facial features, the dodgy-looking young Englishman in charge of the expedition is about as far removed from the stereotypical African explorer as you can imagine. Looks can be deceiving, though. We meet up with this young man and some of his clients in the communal kitchen area that night. He is friendly, well-spoken, chatty, intelligent and interesting and we are astounded by his knowledge of Africa and all things green. It is obvious that he has given his heart to Africa and that he is passionate about sharing its wonders with his young clients. His knowledge and the enthusiasm he injects into the expedition must enhance his fellow travellers’ African experience so very much.
The young travellers are on their way to somewhere else but have managed to squeeze in a night at Addo to see its famous elephants. Sadly, they haven’t been too successful so far. An afternoon in the park hasn’t yielded a single elephant sighting and although they frequently check the waterhole adjacent to the main camp – a popular elephant watering spot – they are out of luck that evening.
They are up early next morning and by the time we emerge from our tent they are packed and ready to leave.
“We’ve a long way to go today but we are just going to go for a quick game drive first to see if we can spot the ellies before we leave,” the young overland operator tells us. The overlanders say goodbye to us and trundle off in their huge vehicle to do some elephant hunting.
We take a game drive a little later then we settle down besides the in-camp waterhole. It is about three hours after the overlanders left the camp so they should be well on their way to their next destination. However, we are surprised when the big r truck arrives back in the rest camp from the direction of the gate into the game viewing area. At the same time, a lovely breeding herd of elephant arrives at the waterhole. There is a mass exodus from the overland truck and the young tourists hurry over to join us at the waterhole.
“We’re running terribly late but I suppose another half an hour won’t make that much difference,” the tour operator tells us. Was it elephant sightings that kept them so long in the game viewing area? Well, actually, no. He explains that, just after entering the game viewing area, he noticed a colony of meerkats going about their business close to the road. Everyone was so enthralled by these quirky little creatures they just sat watching them all morning. They ran out of time and had to leave the game viewing area before they had a chance to look for elephants.
The herd at the waterhole is in fine form. Cute babies are splashing in the shallows, carefully supervised by the adults who suck up and drink bucketfuls of refreshing water, using their ttrunks like drinking straws. Their thirst quenched, they wade into the waterhole for a lunchtime swim. The older children are having a ball. Just like a bunch of human children in a swimming pool, they push and shove, swim and play with gay abandon. A dignified old matriach ignores the rumpus and carefully lowers herself into a secluded mud puddle for a relaxing wallow.
A herd of elephants at a waterhole is such joyful sight and our young companions watch, fascinated. I am so glad they have caught up with the Addo elephants at last. Listening to their conversation, though, I am pleased to hear that are all as thrilled about their morning spent watching the meerkats as they are about this lovely elephant encounter.
Thanks to their wise and observant expedition leader they have learnt the secret of making the most of a visit to a national park – the small creatures are just as important – and just as wonderful to watch – as big, charismatic creatures like elephants.
